1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates generally to configuring information technology (IT) products/solutions and in particular to sharing configuration information between IT product/solution deployments.
2. Background Information
When deploying an infoiination technology (IT) product/solution in a production environment, a frequent and difficult to solve problem is finding the optimal set of configurations to achieve a particular service level or performance target. An issue in deploying enterprise applications today, and determining the configuration that delivers optimal performance, is that applications are increasingly based on a set of other software products which provide a runtime platform for the application (middleware). Another issue is that the applications are developed to run on many platforms (operating systems). Yet another issue is that each application has to be specifically tuned since best practices for development and delivery of optimal performance are not always followed.
Currently if the same IT product/solution is deployed on different customer environments, each customer has to spend time to find the optimal configuration. If two customers have similar computing environments, which leads them to the same optimal configuration, each customer still has to spend time finding an optimal configuration since these customers do not have a dynamic mechanism for sharing information about the optimal configuration. Similar issues arise when an IT service provider has to configure the product/solution multiple times.